Sunday, June 05, 2016

Democrat black primary turnout down 11% from 2008

We've seen Hillary's problem with whites. In the 26 state primaries and caucuses where exit polling was conducted in both '08 and '16, this time around she received fewer white votes in 23 of them than she did when she lost the nomination to Obama in '08.

But the Democrats have a black problem, too. Across those same 26 states, black turnout in '16 was down 11.1%--over 600,000 votes--from '08.

It's not as dire a problem as the party's white flight is. White turnout was down 26.5% in '16 compared to '08 in those 26 states. It could end up being the difference in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida, though.

The Democrats' runaway whites and their unenthusiastic blacks are two major problems Hillary will face in November.

Parenthetically, over the course of Obama's presidency the Democrats have been making progress towards successfully (re?)branding themselves as The Black Party. There was one black voter for every three white voters in the '08 Democrat primaries and caucuses. In '16 that changed to one black voter for every 2.5 white voters.

15 comments:

The Muslims in Michigan largely voted for Bernie Sanders. They will be loyal Clinton voters come election day. Though GOP primary turnout this year in MI was greater than Democrat, Trump only got 36% of the vote, and far fewer votes than Clinton. I suspect Pennsylvania is a swing state, but Michigan just doesn't feel like one.

"black turnout in '16 was down 11.1%--over 600,000 votes"

-That's actually surprisingly little, given that Hillary's a White woman.

26% of Hispanic Republicans went for Trump in the Florida primary. Encouraging or discouraging? I think Florida is a safe state for Trump, despite the fact Clinton got more votes there.

"-That's actually surprisingly little, given that Hillary's a White woman."

Yes, that's really not that bad.

I'm wondering whether blacks didn't really get excited about Obama until much of the primary season was over in 2008. That year was extremely frontloaded, with a big chunk of the season over by February 5th.

Wow, good catch. Yes, that is extraordinarily high. The exit poll shows Carson getting 5% of the white vote while the actual results put him at 6%. Trump at 35% white and 35% total. Could be sampling error, could be Carson got a big chunk of them, or could be that 9% figure is off (that's my guess).

Steve,

Not sure what, if anything, it presages for November, but if 1 in 9 blacks who voted in 08/12 stay home in 16, that comes to nearly 2 million fewer votes, or about 40% of Obama's margin of popular vote victory over Romney. As you know black (and white) votes are more decisive than Hispanic or Asian votes are since the recent swing states--and the ones that are looking like they'll be swing states this time around--are more white and black and less Asian and Hispanic than the country as a whole is.

Anon,

Maybe, though general election polling with and without Johnson included show the Clinton-Trump gap remaining virtually unchanged. Johnson's plan is to call Trump a racist and argue for open borders. I'm not sure how many Republican votes he's going to steal.

Mil-Tech Bard,

Fascinating question. Exit polling data is all at the state level though.

Huffington Post: “Eight out of the 16 states that have held primaries or caucuses so far have implemented new voter ID or other restrictive voting laws since 2010. Democratic turnout has dropped 37 percent overall in those eight states, but just 13 percent in the states that didn’t enact new voter restrictions. To put it another way, Democratic voter turnout was 28% percent worse in states with new voter ID laws.”

It looks like Sean Trende just finished crunching the 2016 Presidential Primary campaign's numbers and came to the conclusion he and those like him can't see the reality of Trump and his supporters because of class blinders.

What makes this cycle so tricky is that the re-emergence of strong class and cultural divides in the election has brought new cleavages to the fore, which are likewise underrepresented among commentators. Not only do you have a whole lot of white folk on Twitter, but you have a whole lot of white professionals with college degrees, disproportionately granted from elite universities. Most of them live in cities and neighborhoods dominated by white professionals with college degrees, disproportionately granted from elite universities, and go to workplaces with similar makeups. Somehow, the pundits look even less like America this cycle than in the past.

I believe that most people in my Twitter feed, left and right, don’t know many genuine Trump supporters, if any. I can count two, maybe three among my Facebook friends, and I went to high school in Oklahoma. It’s the exact problem I discussed back in January: There’s a cosmopolitan vs. traditionalist divide that runs through our politics, with cultural cosmopolitans running both parties.

The fact that Trump is so firmly positioning himself against those cosmopolitans, more so than any national politician since Ronald Reagan, makes it difficult to evaluate his campaign, and deprives us of the conversation we need, because for the first time in a long time, a major party candidate isn’t really trying to curry favor with opinion leaders.

One of the biggest reasons Donald Trump is considered to be a long shot to win the presidency is the diversity of the country.

As Joe Scarborough of MSNBC put it, “There are not enough white voters in America for Donald Trump to win while getting routed among minorities.”

But a growing body of evidence suggests that there is still a path, albeit a narrow one, for Mr. Trump to win without gains among nonwhite voters.

New analysis shows that millions more white, older working-class voters went to the polls in 2012 than was found by exit polls on Election Day. This raises the prospect that Mr. Trump has a larger pool of potential voters than generally believed.

Steve Sailer had a thorough post on the article. It is, in sum, what he's been writing about for over a decade. The exit pollers come in with a conception of the demographic profile and then try to fit their samples accordingly. Consequently, they're not very good at predicting changes. Instead, they tend to show what the outcome of the current election would be if the turnout was the same as the previous election. In a political realignment year this means they're going to be less reliable than normal, and they're only approximations in 'ideal' situations to begin with.

I should've done a better job tracking where primary exit polls didn't show the winner to have actually won. This was the case in MO, where exit polls showed Cruz winning while Trump narrowly did so. There were a few others.

Cohen mentions that Trump needs to make inroads in Iowa and Wisconsin with white voters. Wrong. He's not going to win either of those cuck corridor states--Romney couldn't even with Ryan as VP--nor does he need to. He needs to hold the line everywhere Romney did and pick up Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. That gets him there. This seems the most clearcut electoral strategy to me.